MF Doom Albums From Worst To Best

Counting Down: MF Doom Albums From Worst To Best

"Geedorah is a space monster. He's not from the Earth. I made it different on purpose." -- DOOM on Take Me To Your Leader

DOOM's inhabiting the three-headed monster from Godzilla movies may be his most successful sidestep yet. As King Geedorah, DOOM took the chance to make an album that's quite odd. A number of the tracks feature members of the Monsta Island Czars collective (Rodan, Gigan, MF Grimm, etc.) in full force, often rapping over songs that ride one loop for several minutes. The sample audio quality is generally horrible, and the music chosen can be distorted or ambient, as on "No Snakes Alive."

But Take Me To Your Leader somehow manages to impress the whole way through, with King Geedorah giving space to tracks like Gigan's "Krazy World," the mumbly whims of which at first alienate us, then hypnotically draw us in.

In the beginning, the album's outer-space vibes seem too difficult to groove to, but by the halfway point we can't wait for Mr. Fantastik to spread the word "expeditiously" over an entire bar. The attention to language astounds, as always, with DOOM often playing the role of town crier ("Render unto Geedorah what is Geedorah's!"). But DOOM's relative absence as rapper and extreme presence as a producer allows him to patronize rappers that he does support, and to entice us as listeners to really think about the environments created by our music. As such, the sound collage elements flow flawlessly, making Take Me To Your Leader a great story if nothing else, and an incredible representation of monster movie hysteria that shouldn't be missed.

Last year in the U.K., Carol Morley released Dreams Of A Life, a documentary about a woman who died in her North London apartment and was not found for three years. No one came looking. Police found her skeleton amongst Christmas presents yet to be wrapped.

The film’s press materials and many of its critics posit it as an urban dweller’s caveat — “Would anyone miss you?” — reminding us of the suffocating isolation possible even in a dense, social capital like London. But the talk surrounding the story barely hints at its most haunting detail: The television was on. For three years it chirped away, as programming changed and major news broke and Joyce Vincent rotted.

What unfurled and accumulated in that room — years of sound and light, records of London and what London was watching — that is the only possible analogue to the nightmarish cultural overflow of DOOM’s music. Every album breathes with a distinct personality, each a shapeshifting assemblage of personage and programming that sounds more like a kind of miraculous hyperlinked sound collage than rap.

A London-born recluse himself, Daniel Dumile’s path led him through New York and Atlanta — two rap meccas — from near-homelessness to the shelter of a metal mask. Along the way, he seemed to absorb everything around him. Having grown out of the most prolific period in rap music to date, starting roughly in the mid- to late-1980s, he experienced firsthand the sparkling wave of young, intelligent New Yorkers with politics that didn’t overwhelm the soul of party music. He would collect and later reuse audio from cartoons, monster movies, news bulletins, and countless other sources. After a record label dispute and the death of his brother Subroc, killed crossing the Long Island Expressway, DOOM disappeared, resurfacing years later with a stocking over his head, and then always the mask. Part gladiator, part The Fantastic Four‘s Dr. Doom, it became a barrier, a platform for reinvention, a shield from the industry that he claims badly deformed him.

His lyrical feats go unmatched for sheer idiosyncrasy and insight; beyond rap enthusiasts, many of his strongest supporters are (perhaps unsurprisingly) writers and jazzheads. DOOM may not be the first rapper you’d throw on at a party, but he’s definitely the only one to be “the supervillain cooler than a million / I’ll be chillin’ / still quick to slice squares like Sicilians.” His references come from just about everywhere, but he prefers street language, old sayings, and things you can purchase at a bodega.

A master of “the microphone, beats, or the wheels of steel,” he has constantly swapped out his tools and collaborators, avoiding revision and instead choosing reinvention. Beginning with his brother, he has worked with the entire spectrum of the rap universe, with the exception of any true “luxury” rapper. After KMD, he moved into totally different territory, often producing and rapping alongside members of the mysterious collective M.I.C. (Monsta Island Czars), crafting beats that favored oddly chopped samples, psychotically left-field source material, or simply unpleasant sounds. He became MF Doom, then MF DOOM, then simply DOOM, with a host of aliases along the way.

And the samples themselves — they’re almost more indicative of a DOOM song than DOOM’s voice. They come from everywhere. You might suddenly recognize a “Kon Karne” background voice on a Frank Zappa record. And there’s an Anita Baker piano riff. You’ll find yourself falling asleep to a Godzilla movie, or was it Take Me To Your Leader?

It used to be that stumbling upon DOOM’s samples was your only experience of him outside his music, but these days he’s everywhere. Just after the release of JJ DOOM, at a moment when he’s never been so forthcoming about where he is (London), what’s happening (having a hard time getting back to the US after a customs mix-up), or what he’s working on (finishing a new Madvillain album and the long-awaited DOOMSTARKS collaboration with Ghostface Killah), we go back to rediscover a little bit of the mysterious romance that keeps us thinking about DOOM. As his collaborations are so omnipresent as to be ubiquitous, we had to limit our coverage to full-length albums with DOOM rapping throughout, that were definitively not just beat libraries or production forays on M.I.C. records.

Absolutely. Vaudeville Villain is DOOM’s most cohesive album. The production is top notch, giving you the atmosphere of the city he’s from along with very stylish beats, and it also displays his rhyming at it’s very strongest. I’m okay with MM.. Food being #1 though, being that I’m sure a lot of people who don’t listen to DOOM will read this and go to that album first, because in my opinion it’s the best album to start out with in his discography.

Agreed on the distaste towards Madvillainy being unwarranted, but the respect to Operation: Doomsday is pretty pleasing. Curious as to why people don’t think Mmm…Food shouldn’t easily take the top slot. It is easiest Doom’s most concentrated work and in my opinion his strongest showing.

While nothing on this list is as egregious as choosing Vol 3 as the best Jay-Z album (a choice that bent the notion of art’s subjectivity to its breaking point), creating a list of the best MF DOOM albums and not topping it with either Madvillainy or Operation: Doomsday is still kind of baffling.

Really, these album ranking lists are pretty damn genius. Not because they produce compelling, thoughtful music journalism (which they don’t), but because they provide an endless stream of easy, antagonistc content guaranteed to generate lots of pageviews and indulge in that classic rock critic conceit of flying in the face of stodgy, old-guard consensus and championing unlikely, overlooked, perhaps even maligned albums as some form of punk rock contrarianism.

Mind you, I’m commenting, so I’m by no means above the cheap thrill of getting into pointless arguments about pop culture ephemera, and flinging the faux-outrage like it’s going out of style, but I at least have the decency to be ashamed of it.

I think these lists are great for getting people to revisit back catalog material, and I’m glad I’ve gone back and checked/rechecked some stuff.

For some reason, for example, I’d never listened to Sonic Youth’s Goo before the Stereogum list, just skipped it. I’m a casual SY fan, so I don’t really need to have listened to everything, but to jump from Daydream Nation to Dirty (which I never liked much as a whole) was just odd.

Or here – I haven’t listened to Vaudeville Villain in years, and between the write-up and some of the comments about stuff like the open mike stuff, I find myself amazed that I’d forgotten about such a killer album.

That said, yeah, while good, Mm Food should be lower and Madvillainy should be higher, like top 2.

Just wanted to clone whiskey and kerda’s sentiments and say while often annoying, and seemingly pointless and unnecessary, these lists sometimes do have the benefit of reminding fans of their favorite bands’ catalogs they may have overlooked. I committed the cardinal sin of not having listened to Sister and claiming SY fan, quickly fixed after seeing someone argue it was better than Daydream Nation. Which it probably isn’t by the way, but the list still got me to be re-amazed by Sonic Youth, who I barely listen to nowadays. Sometimes the lists can also be good as jumping-off points to get into a new artist.

Either: From your shitty “article” to your shitty list, this is trash from the top. DOOM is one of the best of a generation. While most “rappers” are spitting the same trite lines over increasingly forgettable tracks, DOOM has continued (until recently) to push forward. To place Born Like This at the bottom is to avoid the fact that it has one of the strongest tracks (of any genre) of the past decade. This list also sabotages the trajectory of this guy’s career. By his nature, DOOM is an uneven and sometimes incomprehensible artist. With the exception of Madvilliany, there is not one DOOM-related album that is great front to back. However, the great moments have clearly gotten greater over the course of his career. There is only one album that lacks any great moments at all, and it certainly isn’t Born Like This. I don’t really want to belabor the point, but though I love DOOM above any other “rap” act going at this point, JJ DOOM is pretty much unlistenable and clearly the worst album of his career. Along with Why?’s forgettable p.o.s., it was the most disappointing release of the year.

Or my other comment option: “I know! Let’s make a list of DOOM albums by pulling them randomly out of my ass after having inserted them randomly into my ass. Then let’s smear the rest across the page and call it ‘music journalism.'”

I hate to take a jab at either DOOM or Why?, but the common bond for those two releases (aside from them being disappointing) is that they just come across as lazy in comparison to previous releases. Mumps, etc. has its moments (‘Strawberries’ is pretty brilliant, as an example), but it is not what we was lookin’ for.

well both were disappointments for me, too, but i’m finding that mumps, etc. is growing on me. it’s a far, far cry from alopecia, which i haven’t stopped listening to for four years now, but there’s some pretty good shit there in the front half. i felt like that pitchfork review was needlessly harsh… creating “a new wrinkle in discussing what ‘career suicide’ can really mean?” fuck you, ian cohen. it really ain’t that bad. you know that they’re required to drop one of those “career suicide” bombs every once in a while, just so they can stay edgy.

jj doom, on the other hand, has not grown on me at all. not one memorable beat on that thing.

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